Ramblings from a compromised mind.

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Announced, beta next week

I’m sure we’ve all heard about the ASP.NET MVC framework that’s coming down the pipe. I’m psyched about it, though I think it might be a little overhyped. In all fairness to the ASP.NET page model, it does a lot of things great and I think if you compare the amount of work you’d have to do manually in the MVC model to what you get from the page model, you’d be looking at doing a lot of manual work. That said, like any technology, you just gotta pick the right tool for the right job.

Today though, Scott Guthrie also mentioned some other features that are coming with the extensions. The one I’m most interested in is that there will be “ASP.NET AJAX Improvements”. What exactly these improvements are isn’t really detailed in his post. It mentions back/forward button support, content linking via permalinks, but those are really things you can have today if you’re using the ASP.NET AJAX Futures. I guess it’s nice to see that they’re being pushed into the “official” realm though. What I’m more interested in hearing about is whether or not any of the things I ranted about when they released the May CTP. The July CTP did nothing to address them and that was the last time the futures were released (it’s almost Dec, talk about dead project?).

Client features aside, I’m also psyched to see Astoria and the ADO.NET Entity Framework coming out with this release. I’m really looking forward to finally being able to trash our in house ORM that I wrote four years ago and use something that has LINQ and great design time support (LINQ to SQL doesn’t cut it for us).